Bachpan

There are songs that wait.

You hear them, you love them, you add them to a playlist and move on. Years pass. And then one day something happens and the song finds you again, and this time it means something else entirely.

Bachpan from Hunterrr has been in my playlist since 2015. I first heard it watching the film in Bhilai. I loved it immediately, melancholic, beautifully written, unlike anything else in the movie. I thought I understood it.

I didn’t.

It has been five years since I lost Dhruva during the COVID pandemic.

I haven’t written a single word about him until now. Not because I don’t want to honour his memory. Because writing it down makes it real, and for five years I’ve preferred the version of the world where he’s simply somewhere else.

We met in engineering college. From that day he was one of those rare people who make your life better without trying to. An ideal son, an intelligent engineer, a devoted husband, and above all a loyal and loving friend to everyone who was lucky enough to be close to him. He had this ability to see the best in people even when the rest of us had already stopped looking.

For all my flaws, I always thought of him as a better version of me. Kinder, wiser, more patient. A gem of a human in the truest sense of the phrase.

The last time I saw him was in Bhilai in February 2021. I was returning the keys to his car, which I had borrowed for a couple of days. We hugged, said we’d meet soon — he had just quit his job in Chennai and was moving back to Bhilai to start something of his own. Two months later, in April, he was gone.

People remember someone by different things. Whenever I hear an old Dev Anand song I think of my grandmother, sitting somewhere, singing along to her favourite actor. She’s been gone for twenty-five years but that memory is still there, clear as anything.

Whenever I hear Bachpan, I remember Dhruva. College group studies the night before an exam, panicking once it was over about whether we’d passed. Cricket matches that had no particular end. Planning for the future. Travelling. Playing PlayStation. All of it comes back.

The song that carried me through the grief was from a film about a man who also didn’t know what to do when loss found him. Bachpan is where the lyrics and my grief became the same thing.

The film Hunterrr is about Mandar, a self-confessed pleasure-seeker who holds no particular regard for love or feelings, until he meets Tripti and wants to settle down. What changes him completely is the sudden loss of his brother Kshitij, who dies while away on army service. A man who has spent his whole life being careless is hit by grief he has no preparation for.

I recognised something in that. I’ve lived most of my life in my own world, carefree, not thinking too hard about what others feel or expect. Grief doesn’t check whether you’re ready. It arrives anyway.

That’s where Bachpan lives. It’s a song about childhood, friendship, and the cruel realization that death doesn’t follow the rules you believed in as a child. When we were young, death was a game. Someone pointed a finger, made a gun sound, and you fell dramatically into the dust. Everyone laughed. A minute later you were all back on your feet.

Then you grow up. One day someone really leaves. And the game turns out to have been a lie all along.

I was in Pune during the lockdown, alone, while everyone else was in Bhilai. Dhruva had been in hospital for more than two weeks. Updates came through our close friends group on WhatsApp — that was the only way I knew what was happening.

On the night of the 24th, a message came in saying he was improving. I turned to my girlfriend and said, bhai thik ho jayega lagta hai. He’s going to be fine.

I went to sleep believing that.

The next morning I woke up to another message.

That day is a blur now. I remember just going through the motions, doing what needed to be done without really being present for any of it. At some point I put Bachpan on, and then it was on repeat, again and again, until I was numb enough to stop.

People say music heals. Time heals. I’m not sure either does, at least not in the way they mean it. Five years on and it hasn’t. Maybe writing this will help, I don’t know. What I do know is that it will always be there, embedded somewhere, quiet most of the time, until I hear this song again.

I still miss you, bhai.